Java User Agent

Question

Hi

I have recently started seeing user agents like Java/1.6.0_14 (and variations) on my site

What does this mean. Is it a browser or bot or what

Answer 1

It means your site is being accessed through the JVM on someones machine. It could be a crawler or simply someone scraping data. You can replicate the user-agent string using the HttpURLConnection class. Here is a sample:

import java.net.*;

public class Request {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

     try {     
         URL url=new URL("http://google.ca");
         HttpURLConnection con=(HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
         con.connect();
         System.out.println(con.getResponseCode());
     } catch (Exception e) {
         e.printStackTrace();
     }

    }

}

Answer 2

Java's HttpURLConnection class will send the JVM version information as the User-Agent header.

Answer 3

This likely means someone is crawling your website using Java. This isn't much of anything to be concerned about unless you notice the crawler using large amounts of your bandwidth or not respecting your robots.txt file. Usually legitimate crawlers will take the time to create custom user agent to make it easy to contact the crawler if you have a problem, but even if they're using the default user agent, it's more than likely perfectly benign.

However, if you do notice a spike in 404 hits or lots of hits from the Java client, you're likely under attack by spammers looking for security holes in your website. If your site is built well, there's not a whole lot they can do other than burn some of your bandwidth, but if they find a security hole, they'll be sure to exploit it. Dealing with spammers properly is beyond the scope of this answer, but a scorched earth solution (which will work as a short term fix at the very least) would be to block all user agents that contain the string 'java'.

Answer 4

The same thing on my site too. Okay let me learn more about the agent or stop them on my site.